Called to Follow: A Savior for the Unwanted

In verse 27, I'm going to go ahead and read through this text, and then we'll spend a few minutes in it together this morning. And so Luke writes this, "After he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at a tax booth, and he said to him, 'Follow me.' And leaving everything, he," that's Levi, "rose and followed him. And Levi made a great feast in his house. And there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at the table with him. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, 'Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?' And Jesus answered them, 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. And I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.' This is the word of the Lord.

And so we begin this morning with two very different groups. And I don't know if you've been in that situation where there are two very distinct groups and you sort of feel an awkwardness between them. I remember the first time that I came back from Bible College at the end of the year, so I would have been finishing my freshman year. I decided that I had wanted to be a preacher at the time, did not know what that had entailed. And so I come back and I go to the barber shop that is in our hometown. You kind of got to walk around a corner into a basement. Two barbers, one very good, one like you might get the short straw, and then you just kind of hope for the best and pray that by the grace of God you still have hair or that like you can fix it when you get home.

And so I am sitting not with barber number one, the good barber, but barber number two, the bad barber. And they asked me, "Oh, so you've been away at college." I used to go in there all the time when I was back. I said, "Yeah." I said, "Well, what are you going to do with your life?" And I was like, "Well, I think I'm going to be a preacher." And then just nobody talks until I leave. It was like the weirdest feeling. I guess maybe it was so unexpected. That's a possibility. It could be everybody just hated preachers. I don't know. I'd heard all these stories from the old guys at Bible college. Well, back in the day, you know, the preacher would go in and get a free haircut. And here it is, just awkward, awkward silence.

And sometimes that's what happens. You have two groups that are in a place, and something happens, and you really see that delineation between the two. This is what is happening in Luke chapter 5. And so I want to unpack the groups, and then we'll kind of walk through the verses of this text, and hopefully see God's grace specifically that Jesus is a savior for those that nobody wants. That Jesus is a savior for the unwanted. And so the first group that we find is a group that Luke will refer to as tax collectors and sinners. And tax collectors work for the Roman government, and in our day, that might not seem like a big deal because we know people who have worked for the government, people who currently work for the government, people who are government adjacent, and it's just a fact of life based on where we live, we know people who work for the government.

At this point in history, Rome has ruled this area of the world, specifically the conquering of Jerusalem, for about a hundred years, and there's about 300 years left before the Roman Empire sort of ceases to be, and you start to get the Holy Roman Empire. And this transition from Jerusalem kind of being in its own place, doing its own thing, has not exactly gone smoothly. And the Romans are not the kind of people that you want occupying. They are cruel, their authority is firm, and they have no patience for any kind of dispute. Literally, the Romans are an occupying army in your country. And here come the tax collectors, working for the occupying army. And also, probably none of us really like to give money to the government. No matter how great the program you might like, or the politician might be,

I don't think there's anybody, and I don't care what your political standing is, who, when it comes time to pay your taxes, goes skipping down to the bank to get a check to pay them. Nobody likes it. And in our case, it's a little bit weird because we get there, "Well, you have to pay your taxes. Well, how much do I have to pay? Well, you go home and figure it out. What if I get it wrong?" Well, you go to jail, right? And we end up in school, and I remember every tax season, Rachel will say, "I can't believe we didn't learn how to do our taxes in school, right? Because those parallelograms are really helping me this parallelogram season." And so we don't like paying our taxes in our modern world, and it's even harder when you're in the first

century living, essentially earning money or producing the produce that day to eat that night, and there is no margin for anything else. And so not only are these guys traitors, they're traitors from among their own people. It would be like helping the enemy. And these tax collectors would come along, they would inflate values on your objects that you were taxing. For example, Levi in this text is likely along a road taxing cargo that is going past, back and forth, almost as a toll road, but more to collect on the produce, which would have been fish from the Sea of Galilee. And they would go, "Oh, well, those are some really nice fish." And the guys are like, "Oh, it's ordinary fish." No, they're extra nice, right? I'm going to tax them at a premium. And the way taxation works in the first century is these

districts get sold by the Romans to different groups or small companies or even individuals who bid on them by saying, "I think I can collect this much tax." And they collect that much and send it to the Romans, and the way they make money is anything they collect over and above. Right? So it's not really a fair taxation. And what's crazy is some of these tax collectors would come along and they would give you a bill. They go, "I can't pay this. I've got to feed my family." And the guy will go, "Oh, it's okay. We offer tax loans to help you." So now not only can't you pay your taxes, you owe 30% on what you just needed to pay. And there is no recourse because these tax collectors work for the Romans, and the judges work for the Romans, and

the tax collectors give money to the Romans, and the judges have a vested interest in making sure there is money to pay them. Like, there's no good options. The Babylonian Talmud, which is just a kind of a commentary on the Old Testament. It's a list of sort of rabbis debating the issues. It says tax collectors are the same category as murderers and robbers. Rabbis said tax collectors can't testify in a Jewish court. They're to be put out of the Jewish synagogue. They can't worship in the Jewish temple. And in fact, most rabbis considered it lawful to lie in almost any conceivable way to avoid paying these tax collectors. Their justification is essentially, you can't really lie to somebody who's not human, right? That's the view. And maybe because of the betrayal of their countrymen, maybe because of the dishonesty, because of

taking advantage while everybody else is scraping to get by, you're stealing their money and living in a big house with great food, right? Tax collectors are not well-liked. The sinners are exactly what they sound like. They are those actively pursuing sin. Not somebody who has sinned in the past, not somebody who in a moment has lost control and sinned. These are people whose life is seeing things that are wrong and seeking to chase after it as hard as they absolutely can. So on one hand you have the tax collectors, the other you have the sinners, and then you have the Pharisees and the scribes. And the Pharisees are part of their several different religious sort of religious political factions in Jesus's day. Right? Probably we've heard of them, right? Pharisees, Sadducees. You'll have the Herodians. You'll have the Zealots. All sort of have one hand in religion, one hand in

politics, and they're trying to use religion to gain more political power and politics to gain more religious power. And it's sort of this massive chaos, and you'll see it later on in the ministry of Jesus, these alliances that come together across party lines to oppose. The Pharisees are one of the groups. The remarkable thing about the Pharisees in their early days, they started out so nobly and so wonderfully. They cared deeply about the Word of God. They cared about following His Word, and they wanted to know His Word and to follow it well. And so the Pharisees began by looking at the world around them and saying, "Man, everything's a mess. Let's go back to the Bible." And so they go back to the Old Testament and they begin to live it out well. But the problem is that by Jesus's

day, they began to care more about their status as Scripture followers rather than the actual Scriptures. They began to care more about the appearance of obedience and actual obedience. They cared more for their own opinions than the truth. And they become paranoid, so they add extra rules to clarify everything in regards to religion. And by the time you get to Jesus's day, they're very religious, but they're very, very full of pride. And with them are the scribes. And the primary work of the scribe was to copy the Old Testament. And so they write it all down, and they do it really well. In fact, they're so accurate that one of the reasons we have such faith and reliability in the Old Testament is because of these scribes. They would copy down each part of the Bible, and they would know how

many letters per page and how many empty spaces per page. And the way they would check is not just sort of scan it for errors, but they would count up all the letters. Does it match? Yep. They count up all the empty spaces. Does it match? If it doesn't, you're only allowed to erase a couple of times, and you have to throw the manuscript away. So much so that when we find the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late 40s, you find a copy of Isaiah that is from before the birth of Jesus that matches so closely the copies that we have today. Now, because they're copying the Bible, they know the Bible very well. And once you become familiar with the Bible, people begin to ask you questions about it. And one of the things that I get pretty regularly

is people who aren't in church or affiliated with church or know much about the Bible will ask questions about this. They'll say, "Well, according to the Bible, can I do this or can I do that?" And I used to kind of sit down and be like, "Well, there's right and wrong, and then there's also wise and unwise." So something might not be wrong, but it's also unwise, right? So you want to be right according to the Bible, and you want to be wise according to the Bible. So there's right and wrong, and then we would talk about how that fit in. Nowadays, after enough times of that question being asked to me, I just simply say, if you have to ask, you probably shouldn't do it, right? That's where it comes down to being. Like, if you're asking about

that specific thing, probably just don't do it. Like, I've answered this question enough. That's how it starts with these scribes, right? People start asking them questions. They'll say, "Let us look through," and they'll answer the questions, and essentially they become Bible lawyers. So you've got the guys who are super legalistic about following the rules and making you follow the rules, and then you've got people. They're Bible lawyers. So you have these two groups, tax collectors and sinners, literally the worst of the worst, maybe even considered by some of these scribes and Pharisees as not even worthy of being called humans, and then you've got the Bible guys and their lawyers. Let's see what happens when they encounter Jesus. We're going to pick it up in 27 and 28. "After this," this is Jesus, "He went out and saw a tax collector named

Levi sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, "Follow me," and leaving everything, he rose and followed him." So to put this into context, Jesus has just cleansed a leper in Luke chapter 5, just a little bit earlier, and he's done so in such a wonderful and compassionate way. It was unheard of in that day. He forgives the sins of a paralyzed man who comes down through the roof, and then to prove that he has the authority to forgive sins, he heals them, and the guy walks out of there. So Jesus has already had a little bit of a confrontation with the Pharisees. And he's walking along the road, sees this guy, a tax collector named Levi. At this time, it's not uncommon to have a Hebrew or Aramaic name and a name in Greek and Latin.

The language of your immediate world and then the language of the world sort of in general of the entire area. And so you would have a name that was your Hebrew or Aramaic name and then a Greek and Latin name. Levi also has two names. Levi is also known in the other Gospels and in this Gospel as Matthew. And so Jesus sees this tax collector and simply says, "Follow me." And it's so simple, but it's so hard. Right? It's easier said than done to follow Jesus. Last week we talked about how sometimes we trust in ourselves or we fear the future. What happens if I do this? Not wanting to leave the comfort of our present situation. And three guys who were called to follow and seeming like they hoped in Jesus, but their self got in the way of that hope. Their fear got in the way of that hope.

Their comfort got in the way of that hope. Jesus shows up to this guy and goes, "Follow me." And leaving everything, he rose and followed him. Consider what this means. Levi has just walked away from his job as a tax collector at the tax booth. Nobody else in the world at that time in this area is going to hire him. Romans aren't going to want him back. He's leaving his life behind. Peter, Andrew, James, and John, they can always go back fishing. But not Levi when he walks away from collecting taxes. He's walking away from everything. And Jesus says, "Follow me." And Levi does. And we don't get the feeling from the text that Levi was necessarily conflicted about this. Because the next thing he does is he begins to celebrate. Look at what it says in verse 29.

"And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at the table with him." And this is the one little tiny bit in the Gospel of Luke. You read this account in Matthew, and you read it in Mark, and the reason we chose Luke is for these words: "And Levi made him a great feast in his house." In Mark, we find that Jesus is eating a feast at Levi's house. And in Matthew, you find he's eating a feast in the house and likely implied that it's Levi's. But Luke gives us this detail: "Levi made him a great feast." In Greek, it's "megas." It's the same word that we get "mega" from. This is not just, "Hey, come over, and we're going to throw some 99 cent hot dogs on the grill."

This guy is having a mega feast with all of his friends. He has just left everything behind. He's left behind his income. Our thought would be, "What if I have to pay a bill later in the week?" And Levi's like, "Mega feast with everybody I know." Do you know why? He is so excited for everybody he knows to meet Jesus. And it's so remarkable and so wonderful that this happens. The guy who has left everything behind now celebrates Jesus with everything he's got left for the rest of his life. And it's scandalous, because Jesus isn't just having dinner, but through his actions he's showing acceptance to his people. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at Jesus' disciples saying, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors?" And so the religious guys show up. Now I have a couple questions here.

One, are they like peeking through the windows, number one? Or do they get invited too, and they're there as well, which the question could be applied to them as well. Probably not invited, but definitely there. And Jesus' actions startle and confuse them. They view tax collectors and sinners as having something contagious, and if you spend time with them, you're going to get it. But also Jesus is demonstrating that he cares and he values these people. And the Pharisees go, "Why are you treating that trash as something that you treasure?" And I think at the heart is injured pride. The Pharisees going, "We're way better than these guys, but yet you're eating with the sinners and the tax collectors?" And look at the response of the Pharisees here. The Pharisees and their scribes, they grumble. So it starts with, I think, probably complaining to each other. "Can you believe this? You see what he's doing?

I can't believe he's going in his house. Oh, now he's sitting down. Now he's eating with him. Now he's talking. Oh, somebody. Now he's laughing. What did they say?" And they began to grumble and complain. And it's where bitterness generally begins in our life, is when we begin to grumble and complain. But then look what they do. They don't even talk to Jesus. What do they do? They grumbled at his disciples. "Hey, what's your boss doing?" Like, they don't even have the decency to talk to Jesus. They talk to his disciples. You see, there's two very different responses to the grace we see displayed in this account. There is joy and hope on the part of Levi, and the tax collectors and the sinners. They want to tell everybody about Jesus. And then there are these religious people who are judgmental, angry, and accusatory.

Let's talk a little bit about the response of grace. Jesus answered them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." And so Jesus, evidently either overhearing them or in his supernatural knowledge, as they're grumbling at the disciples, just turns around and he answers them and he goes, "It's not the well who need a doctor, it's the sick. And I have come not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." And I think in doing this, I don't think Jesus is being snarky or flippant with the Pharisees. I did for a while, but I think what Jesus is doing is he's showing grace to both the unwanted in Levi's house, but also the proud religious guys who show up with their lawyers at a celebratory meal.

To the proud Pharisees with their extensive resume of good works and their legal teams to justify their good works. Jesus says, "Don't you see their brokenness? Don't you see their need? Don't you see their hurts? Don't you see their sins? And don't you know? You've just watched me forgive sins. Don't you know I can do something about this?" And I think part of the problem with the Pharisees is they're looking at this picture with themselves in the center. Probably all of us have had to wait at some point or another. One of the most frustrating places for me to have to wait, right, is that at like a doctor's office, or if you're ever sitting in the emergency room, and you're waiting to be called back, and especially at the emergency room where you go in and they kind of check how sick you are,

and generally I only go to the doctor when either I'm forced to, or when I am on the edge of death. And so I'm sitting there going, why is that guy getting called first? Does he know how sick I am? Right? Now that guy could be having a heart attack, and the guy who went next could be having a stroke, right? And the guy who came in on the ambulance, he definitely has some stuff going on. But right, what happens in that moment? I can only see myself. And this is what is happening with the Pharisees. Why is Jesus spending time with them? We're righteous. We've got Bible lawyers. We know the Bible. We've memorized the Bible. And all they can see is their goodness and themselves, rather than the need of these tax collectors and sinners.

And what Jesus is doing here, he doesn't just tell them, he illustrates it, right? Jesus, think about a doctor who gets seen first. The sick. And that's what I'm here doing. I'm coming here to call them to repentance. I'm not participating in sin. Jesus says, "I'm calling people out of it." If these Pharisees truly were as religious as they wanted to appear to be, they would love the fact that Jesus is calling people to repentance. But they don't. And what's interesting to me, a little bit about this text, is in Jesus' day, right, it's scandalous because Jesus is eating with tax collectors. It was so scandalous, in fact, that the Jewish skeptic, a guy by the name of Celsus, will actually use this as why we shouldn't believe in Jesus. He writes an answer to Celsum and explains what Jesus is doing here.

But in our day, for many of us, we look at this and we don't think much about the tax collectors or the sinners. We're okay with that. But we struggle on the other end with maybe the overly religious. And here's what I love about Jesus, is He comes with grace for both. He comes for the tax collector and the sinner, and He comes for the Pharisee, and He comes for the scribe. And I want you to understand this morning, as Jesus is trying to help both of these groups to see and to understand, that grace is not out of reach for the sinner, or is it earned by the righteous? You see, you and I, we are oftentimes used to sort of two teams, right? We've got the good guys and the bad guys. And we really, really always want to be the good guys.

And if you're watching the old cowboy movie, right, you've got the white hats and the black hats. The good guy that you can tell who is who, and we want to be the good guys. And this is true in life as well. We always want to be on the right side. We want to be the good guys. But here is the problem in relation to God. It's that all of us have sinned, and all of us have fallen short of the glory of God. Romans 5 tells us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That we are not good guys and bad guys, but the proper categories for this world is bad guys and Jesus. And what we find Jesus saying is that grace, it's not like a credit score, right? Where you make good decisions, and you're responsible, and you get benefits, or you make bad decisions, or you have bad

emergencies, or life surprises you, and all of a sudden you struggle, and then all of a sudden you're in trouble because your score isn't high enough. Grace is not like that. Grace is God's gift to all. The sinner and the tax collector are the same recipient of grace as the very religious Bible memorized Pharisee on the other side. And the first thing we must see is that grace is for everyone, and secondly, grace comes first. Before there can be transformation, there has to be a seeing of grace. What happens to Matthew? Think about what happens. The guy is collecting taxes on the side of the road, only has terrible people as friends. And what happens? Jesus shows up, shows him this grace, he throws a party, and he follows Jesus. You see, grace isn't just this good feeling of motion, it's transformational.

We said Levi has a second name, it's Matthew. Probably most of you know that he writes the very first book of the New Testament, a Gospel. The good news about Jesus comes from a guy on this side of the road who is a terrible sinner. There's another guy in the Bible who also has two names. And I want you to see that both the proud and the discouraged need grace. The other guy is the other side of this equation, he's the Pharisee's Pharisee, right? He's circumcised on the eighth day of the tribe of Benjamin. He's a Hebrew of Hebrews. As to the law, he's a Pharisee. As to his energy for the Jewish religion, he's a persecutor of the church. And as to righteousness under the law, this man, also with two names, is blameless.

You probably know his names: Saul and Paul. And when Paul writes about himself, it's: I'm the chief of sinners. God, by his grace, has saved me. It's not my goodness. It's not my speech. He writes to the church that, as I was there, it was not in a demonstration of my power, but trembling. And it was only through the power of the working of God through the Spirit. And the Apostle Paul turns into, I think the only way to describe it, is like a velociraptor for the Gospel, right? He just goes from place to place, and eventually from courtroom to courtroom, and jail to jail, proclaiming the Gospel. And you go, "How?" And the answer is simply grace. Grace transforms. And there are people who are part of our church who have seen that kind of transformation in their life.

Like Levi, to this place where grace and the following of Jesus comes. Grace changes everything when you encounter it. Third, grace is kind of a messy thing, right? It's awkward. Think about this. Levi is a tax collector. He's a tax collector in Capernaum. Capernaum is where Peter, Andrew, James, and John are. Remember, they're professional fishermen. Which means they're probably walking down this road regularly with a load of fish. And here's Levi, the tax collector, extorting them for money. How do you think those first few days on the road with Matthew slash Levi, the tax collector, are going with Peter, James, and John, the fishermen who have just been ripped off by this guy probably their entire life? How do you think that works out? Like, when grace really changes you, it's going to be messy.

When people who come into the church who have never known Jesus or been around Jesus, right, it's going to be messy. But grace transforms. I want to read to you from Matthew chapter 1. It just simply says this: "For behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us." And what Matthew is doing here is he's translating a word that people might not know, so they can understand the meaning of it. But I want you to think about Levi slash Matthew as he writes out his list of credentials for Jesus. Here's where he came from. Here's how he was born. Here's how his father learned about the miraculous power of God in the pregnancy of Mary. And Matthew, the tax collector, writes these words, "And they shall call his name Immanuel," which means "God with us."

I can picture him writing that, having been transformed and understanding that it was God with us who met him in that tax booth, who defended him in that meal, who taught him, and strengthened him, and died on the cross for his place, who rose again in victory, that these words, "God with us," for this tax collector, imagine they were not written without a depth of emotion. And that's not just for Levi or for Matthew. It's for us as well. Because we may not be tax collectors, and we may not quite be Pharisees, but every single one of us are in need of the grace of God. And that grace comes through Jesus. It transforms us. It strengthens us. And ultimately, it's what brings us home. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for your love and for your grace. We thank you for how you care for us and watch over us.

How you've saved us and how you've strengthened us. We just ask that as we consider the story of Levi, that you would help us to see grace. That you would help us to set aside our pride if we're very content with who we are and see your grace. And that if we feel like we are so broken and so broken,